Henry loves to talk about sneezing, but when he says the word sneeze, it sounds like the word cheese. And he also calls coughing sneezing. So every time he coughs or sneezes, he then says, “Achoo! I cheese!” Or when I sneeze, “Mama cheese!”
Of course the two-year-old puppy routine is all cute until I hear Tre saying from the other room, “Mom! Henry is chewing on your new shoes!” Well, thanks, Tre for telling me before Henry did any damage to them. And yesterday it took us approximately three days to get through Target due to little puppy Henry alternately crawling on hands and knees, barking, or flailing as I impatiently carried him like a sack of potatoes.
So not having a dog does make life easier in about a hundred different ways, with nobody to steal food from the kids or countertop, escape out the front door and bolt up the street, poop in the yard, etc. But this morning while I was laying out food in preparation for some friends coming over, I dropped some grapes, cheese, and chocolate chips on the floor. I was thinking about how I didn’t have a dog to snatch up those bits of food, so I would have to get down and pick them up. And just then, Henry got down off his chair at the table, got down on all fours, started barking, and crawled around the floor eating up all the bits of food.
Henry has been coming up with new words all the time, but I have been a little antsy about his speech. His pronunciation is still a little crazy. He’s good with the number of syllables and tone, but not so good with pronunciation. “Doh” means about twenty single-syllable words for him. I’d noticed that he wasn’t combining words into his own sentences, even though that is supposed to be common by his age. He’s more likely to say one word, see if you understood that one correctly, then add another one. I think he’s just moving along at his own pace and doesn’t need any help other than the reading and talking we’re doing with him, but I’ve been watching.
A couple nights ago he was playing around with Leon and me in the evening, and he started talking about his toes. Then he busted out with his first real sentence, “I eat feet!” and started chewing on his toes. We got excited about his new sentence, and he ws happy and proud.
This morning was the kind of morning that you might imagine before having kids, which would make you long to have them. On Fridays I volunteer at Tre’s kindergarten. They have parents come in and help for about an hour, doing “centers” for five kids at a time. All twenty kids rotate through the centers, so you interact with five kids at a time in intervals of fifteen minutes.
I’ve been loving the volunteer work. It’s so nice to know the kids in his class and the teacher and see the kind of things that they do. And it is reassuring to a jittery first-time-mom-of-a-public-school-kid to see my child sitting happily in class, paying attention reasonably well and playing with other kids at recess as I’m finishing up and hanging out just a little longer to watch. Tre also looks forward to having me come every Friday, talking about it all week, and it is something that lets him know he’s important to me. It’s interesting to see the techniques that the teacher uses to keep twenty kids behaving well and focused…things I try to remember to use with my two little ones at home. It tends to feel hectic to me, trying to help five kids at different levels focus on a task and complete it in fifteen minutes. The kids are getting in the routine now though, and that’s making it easier.
The kids have been studying apples this week. A couple days ago they all filed out of their class with Johnny Appleseed pots on their heads, made from construction paper. Tre was surprised when I guessed what kind of hat he was wearing, not thinking I would know about Johnny Appleseed too! I went to school too, I told him. But today, we got to make pie. Applesauce too! His teacher kindly warned me that we were baking today, having saved the baking for the day I was coming, since I had told her I liked to bake. So I was prepared with an apron and a couple extra things to make pie crust and make a pie.
It reminded me of cooking in college, with a haphazard collection of cooking implements, a toaster oven, and a hot plate. Without a rolling pin, I used a musical instrument stick to roll out my pie dough, with wax paper between it and the dough. The first group of kids cut up the apples for the pie, mixed them with some spices and sugar, and threw them in the pan after the bottom crust. And the second group helped me with the top crust, then got to peel and cut apples for applesauce. The third and fourth groups got to prepare apples for applesauce. The teacher had this great apple peeler/slicer/corer that the kids could crank to prepare the apples, and they loved the way it would make a long corkscrew slice out of the apple flesh. Some of the kids liked to nibble on the peelings, and some would find seeds in the cores to save. We had cinnamon and nutmeg, so I let the kids smell the spices that were going in the pie and sauce. Cinnamon was universally liked, but nutmeg was too strong for about half of the kids.
A pie takes a while to bake, and we had it done just in time to let it cool off a little and cut it into twenty little pieces. Those kids were eyeing the pie as I was cutting it up, and they were listening to a story about apples. Most of the kids really liked the pie, though a few were not so impressed. Tre, as usual, loved the crust but could take or leave the filling. But, as I would expect, he happily scooped up a piece that was extra due to a child’s absence, and he felt like he got a bonus.
One little girl won my heart today telling me that when Tre was feeling sad about something, she gave him a hug to help him feel better. And when they were at recess and I was cleaning up, I heard another girl ask Tre if he wanted to help her sweep, and he happily said yes. Having that first kid go to school seems to be as big an adjustment for me as for him, and those things help us both.
We totally knew this was coming, and I figured it would be within the next few months, but damn, it still hurts. Poor fifteen-year-old Angus finally succumbed to old age, with the final blow being his skin infection, which had become drug-resistant. Within a couple days he went from creaky but good-spirited to immobile and sad. It hurts my heart to think of the way he looked at me when I tried to help him up and he just didn’t have it in him. He was just through. And he was a tough dog.
This grief thing is harder with the kids to care for, and feeling the responsibility for helping them deal with their sadness too. The sympathy for their hurt sort of circles back in on my hurt and piles up. Henry doesn’t really get it, and is still more in the present moment than Tre, but threw a huge fit when he saw me bagging up Angus’ medications for disposal. He calmed down after talking about Angus, and how we miss him and wish we could give him a treat. He has seen me crying a few times, and pointed at me saying, “Angus!” So he has some idea, and picks up on the emotions. Angus was quite old by the time Henry joined the family, and didn’t really play with Henry. But Henry loved to give Angus treats and play with him as much as Angus would tolerate, holding his tail and getting whipped off his feet when Angus walked. When I tell him that Angus isn’t coming back and we have to say goodbye, Henry says, “babye” in his sweet, cheerful voice, and it starts me crying again.
Tre was sad and scared when he knew that Angus was going to die soon, and we read some books that his kindergarten teacher lent us, and we cried. But since we said goodbye to Angus before Leon took him to the vet that last time, He hasn’t shown overwhelming emotion. I don’t know if he got it out earlier, or if things are still sinking in and will come out soon. He was disturbed by all my crying the day after Angus died, and he made me some letters to cheer me up. I had bought him a pack of envelopes to play with, because he loves to do art with envelopes. And he made me four letters–triangle papers inside envelopes, with sad faces on them and his name. Then he put them in the drawer of my bedside table, where he always puts mail that he makes for me. He has been very edgy and whiny today, and I’m sure that has a lot to do with living with parents who are still sad. Not that we’re just crying all day, but it’s still here and feeling raw. The truth is, Angus was old by the time Tre was a little kid who would want to play with a dog, so he never knew the young, playful Angus either.
All these memories have come back about how Angus used to be, before he got so old and before the kids came around to take up so much time and attention. He used to be a crazy, playful dog, and would throw cardboard soda boxes into the air and attack them, destroying them. We used to drink a lot of soda. And watching him run was amazing. He loved to go camping with us and jump around the rocks and into the water. He was very jealous when I first came into Leon’s life, after having so much of Leon’s attention for his first three years, and he destroyed my denim jacket. But I started walking him, and that totally won him over. He was a tough, loud black and tan counhound with a bay like a sea lion. And having him in the house, alert to intrusion gave me a secure feeling. It gave me an annoyed and tired feeling when he would occasionally tree racoons in the back yard at three o’clock in the morning. But even that was kind of cool, seeing him so intent on doing what he was bred to do, despite never having been taught to hunt.
I did really love that dog, though he became very hard to live with in the last couple years when he seemed to be getting senile and there were the kids to take care of too. He became less disciplined about stealing food from the kids, and two kids to watch out for made it more difficult, so I just had to separate him from us every time we ate a meal or snack. Stubborn dog, he would bark to get back in, and I didn’t manage to get him to handle that better. So day-to-day life with Angus had stress for me. And when you’re stressed from kids acting their age and pushing your buttons, outside events, and the dog all put together, it’s so much easier to own up to being mad at the dog than mad at your kids. I wish I had been a little more patient with the old dog.
It’s just hard for Leon, who has had that dog since he was in college, basically his whole adult life. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone to love a dog so much.
Goodbye, old dog.
Tre is thinking about numbers all day. It has increased since school started up, and he counts things all the time. But he thinks about more than counting, and more than what they’re currently working on in kindergarten, talking about addition and sometimes multiplication.
The practical math problem he does over and over is, “When I’m X years old, how old will Henry be?” or the reverse question. Sometimes he figures it out, and sometimes he asks me to figure it out. He loves imagining his and Henry’s future selves, and of course the fact that he will always be the older one. “When Henry’s 100, I’ll be 103, and I’ll be SO TALL!”
He also loves doubling numbers. When he runs across a number, he has to figure out what it would be added upon itself, asking me if it’s too big for him. We had a conversation going for a while the other day just doubling numbers. We started with twelve, since there were twelve pieces in a puzzle we were doing. And after several doublings, he switched to his favorite number, 200,000, because we were still so far below that favorite number. So then he would ask me, “What’s 200,000 plus 200,000?” And I’d say, “400,000.” He’d laugh, “Ha!” like each result was such a humorously big number, then ask me to double that one. When it got into so many millions, it was hilarious.
He has figured out the concept of multiplication, telling us how many three or four of some small number make. But of course he hasn’t mastered every step between the basic counting and multiplication. A few days ago, after mourning the loss of the big sunflowers at the end of the summer, we were counting sunflower seeds that he gathered. And as we got to two hundred, with just a little pile left compared to the two-hundred pile, he said, excited at how big the numbers were getting, “I bet we have 200,000!”
I love it, of course.
Tre is addicted to Tom and Jerry. I feel compelled to say that it was never a show that I would have put on TV for the kids, with all of the more educational shows available. But Leon turned it on for him once, and he was instantly addicted. Of course the show has such absurd amounts of meanness and comical violence, that I felt worried about Tre and Henry watching it. And I did talk to him about how we don’t do the things that they do on the show, that they would actually kill someone, etc. But I have to admit that I can see what he likes about it, especially compared to some of the benign kid shows out there. It is actually funnier to watch cartoon slapstick than to watch puppets singing happily about how they wear their helmets whenever they ride their bikes or climb a tree.
So I’m letting him watch some amount of Tom and Jerry during the day. I do find myself wanting to say the cliche, “I did it, and I turned out alright!” But I hate to say that about anything, not wanting to be a complacent parent who doesn’t learn from mistakes others have made. But I did watch it, and while I might have issues, it never occured to me to blame them on the cartoons.
It is funny how I haven’t thought about the show for so many years, but I remember most of them when we see them. We must have watched them over and over. And they really were made in a different time. Leon had put on some similarly old cartoon, and I was remarking to him that the kids wouldn’t get so many of the jokes, like the kind of thing where someone eats corn back and forth with the sounds and rhythm of a typewriter. And he asked me if I had just caught a joke about a red skeleton. And of course I hadn’t, though he knew that it was a reference to an old comedian Red Skelton. So I guess even I don’t get all the jokes.
Excited that Tre is finally old enough to enjoy playing with regular Legos, instead of the giant non-choking-hazard ones for toddlers, I bought Tre a gigantic starter stash of Legos for his birthday this year. And some other people gave him some sets for his birthday too. I didn’t own Legos when I was a kid, but I did spend time playing with my brothers’ sets. It’s funny how I was always interested in their toys, but when it came to choosing my own toys, I would pick the girl things. Maybe I knew I’d get to play with their toys anyway, but there weren’t any other girls in the family. Or maybe I just knew that was what I was supposed to do.
So Tre and I have been putting his Lego sets together. Being at the early end of the age range for the toys, he gets frustrated or distracted if he tries to put them together by himself. But it’s tough, because Henry can’t be counted on to leave our stuff alone long enough for us to put things together. And there’s that new school thing getting in the way of all our play time. But we’re working on it. And I love that the big sets are divided into separate modules now, so you don’t have to wait until you have a whole day to spend before opening up a big set.
It’s so interesting putting them together with Tre. He is always pretending something, flying the pieces around or driving them around when they’re not even close to being finished, or having pieces talk to each other and form relationships. And he has started talking to me in his own pretend language while we put them together. So I try to answer him in the same language. Tre will spout off some long series of sounds, and I’ll pretend to answer, “Li li” or something. Once in a while he will have to revert to English when the pretend talk and motioning is just too ambiguous. Between the pretend talk, he spouts out bits of whatever song he’s currently got into his head, over and over. With his constant pretending and singing, it’s such a different experience putting together Legos with him than I expected.
A couple weeks ago I showed Tre a video that was circulating on the web showing a guy setting a record for the number of watermelons he could smash with his head, because I thought he would find it amusing. But as the guy started smashing his head into one watermelon after another, Tre started getting so upset! He said he hated that guy and got so sad and angry.
“Those watermelons are all getting ruined! Nobody will get to eat them! I don’t want him to come to our town! What if he comes to Trader Joe’s?”
I calmed him down and assured him that nobody would be coming to our local stores and smashing all the watermelons before we could buy them. From his perspective, he must have seen this beautiful table full of one of his very favorite fruits, then out of the blue, destruction! And not understanding the context or the idea of doing strange things to set records, which maybe I don’t quite get either, it was baffling to him.